The End of Spring Break
Prompts a Reminder
of the Tasks Ahead
  Regarding Graduation
and First-Year Licensure.

 
Friday, March 26, 2010

Interns:
I hear rumors that some of our interns are having a great time in Florida. Others are slogging it out in the snow and rain or hibernating in the library. On this last weekday of Spring Break, the sun graces us with a day of good cheer and promise. Is spring really here? You wouldn’t know it by the foot of snow we witnessed on the first official day of the season.

Alas, we are reminded of the tasks ahead by one of our intrepid interns, who compiled a list of assignments due by semester’s end — not counting resumes, job applications, and the paperwork needed for that first-year license.

Let’s see. . . . background check, licensure application, Praxis II tests — content, productive, and pedagogy if you are Spanish; content, productive, PLT if you are French; and Goethe Prüfung and PLT if you are German. Then there’s the Praxis III exam if you intend to stay in Arkansas and teach, but that’s a bit down the line. Novice teachers can take up to three years to pass that one.

But back to the matter at hand, the end-of-semester requirements for this course. Fortunately, only three assignments remain:

1. the CALL lesson plan and presentation due in class in April;
2. the textbook evaluation due on Chalk and Wire May 3;
3. the student assessment due by e-mail on May 5.

Each of these assessments relates to the ACTFL Program Standards for the Preparation of Foreign Language Teachers.

Finally, don’t forget to check your calendar for observation times. The dates are not set in stone due to the fluid nature of public school schedules and the professoriate, but we will do our best to adhere to the schedule.
 

Dr. FAB

Freddie A. Bowles
Assistant Professor of Foreign Language Education
Department of Curriculum and Instruction
College of Education and Health Professions
Stone House South F09
University of Arkansas
Fayetteville, AR 72701
Office: 479-575-3035
fbowles@uark.edu

Different languages — I mean the actual vocabularies, the idioms — have worked out certain mechanisms of communication and registration. No one language is complete. A master may be continually expanding his own tongue, rendering it fit to bear some charge hitherto borne only by some other alien tongue, but the process does not stop with any one man. While Proust is learning Henry James, preparatory to breaking through certain French paste-board partitions, the whole American speech is churning and chugging, and every other tongue doing likewise.
     — Ezra Pound, "How to Read," 1929